Improving The Quality of Elementary Education - in developing countries and India (especially post-RTE); equal learning opportunities for the poor and marginalized; insights gained from processes in India and South Asia. All this adds up to CHANGE - and the material here is meant for those sharing the adventure...

If you’re from a poor family, there’s a lot
more to life than just attending school! Siblings and domestic animals have to
be cared for, parents have to be helped, essentials such as water or firewood
have to be fetched, birds and animals kept away from the farm, you may need to
migrate with your parents…. It’s not necessary that all this is a waste – in
fact, despite the shadow child labour, a lot of this is also learning for
life. Children who are in a position to attend daily too might learn a lot if they
spent a day or two every week doing things other than school – such as tending
to gardens, pursuing a passion, trying to earn something by putting their
learning to use, solving a neigbhourhood problem, helping their siblings and
parents, making things…. Or helping their underprivileged classmates so that they
can spend more time in school.

The kind of focused (and therefore limited)
scholastic learning our ‘advanced’ children end up doing has resulted in
several luminaries pointing out that (even from institutions such as the IITs)
our graduates are ‘unemployable’. One might add they haven’t developed many
other aspects of their personality – including civic consciousness.

However, what this requirement of daily
attendance does is to marginalize great numbers of children, since the
teaching-learning process tends to be sequential (rather than re-iterative). If
you miss out an earlier part, you can’t ‘keep up with the class’ and slowly
head for being left out or pushed out or dropping out. Effectively, the school
is saying: if you are poor and cannot attend regularly (as the we require), you
shall not learn. Instead of: attend when you can, we’ll find a way to support
you and make sure you learn (which is what the business of the school really
is).

There are
a few walk-in centres in the country (though of course only for poor and/or
working children) and some of them do manage to attract and keep children for a
long time even though there is no compulsion to attend. That kind of
flexibility is perhaps too much to hope for in the school system. Enabling the
school to be more responsive to children’s real living situations, though –
that’s both possible and desirable. It needs a spiraling rather than linear
flow, a variety and range of materials, and providing children engaging
activities in many of which they will work on their own, and the use of a tracking
system to keep record of progress. This gels with every provision of the RTE,
with expectations put forward in our National Curriculum Framework, and much
that contemporary understanding of pedagogy tells us. However, to make it
happen what we need is not methods and materials but a way to get rid of this
myth and the fear that everything will fall apart if the school seeks to respond
(by adapting to children’s needs) rather than coerce (by making children adjust
to its needs).

Any
suggestions?

Tomorrow, Myth # 3 of 7

PS - Here's a response to a reader that might be of use.

Sundara VelavanCould you please elaborate on the origins of this myth, sir and the underlying attitudes and beliefs from which this myth stems forth?

Subir ShuklaSundara Velavan, I'm not really a historian of education, but from what little I know, for centuries formal learning took place in terms of the school room or gurukul. These were places where children of different ages came together, the teacher set the curriculum (i.e. decided who would learn what and how much, and when they had completed their studies), different students did different things, and sometimes advanced students were in charge of those beginning.

It was in the military schools of Prussia that the notion of dividing children into year-wise 'class' came about - it was a means of 'disciplined' learning leading to later military discipline, and offered a predictable means to knowing when a certain number of soldiers/officers would be available.

By putting all the children of the same age together and making them all learn the same thing over given periods, it seemed so organised, appealing, and management-friendly that the idea spread like wildfire. The practice is not very old, having originated (I think, but can't be sure at this time) in early 19th century. In about 120 years, it became so widely established that the it appears to most of us as the only valid mode of teaching children. It was also widely adopted by the church, which set up the earliest schools in most part of the world, in the wake of colonial powers. In some ways, the way the church was education - as preparation for later life of a certain kind - it was not very different form the military view.

In the military academy, the focus was not so much on education as on training. Conformity, cooperation, being at the same level as others was obviously highly needed for the kind of military that was emerging. With the growth of industrialization, this way of organising children into learning groups naturally became more common, as most of them were being prepared for certain limited forms of professions, where following instructions given the industrialist was the key expectation. The later use of assembly-line as a means of 'efficiency' served to re-inforce this further. People still talk proudly of themselves as being 'products' of certain institutions. (In the elite schools such as Eton or the Doon School in India, the real differentiation was - and is - outside the class in the range of activities to choose from, as well as the variety of subjects students could choose - such choice not being available to their less privileged peers. The tutorial system they use also provides a way to address the diversity of needs.)

Not surprisingly, this same-size-fits-all approach has carried over in the name of preparing children to be citizens (following orders, being 'disciplined'), being social (listening to elders, obeying rules, not being different from others), and seeing themselves as the vehicles for fulfilling their 'superior's' wishes (which is why 'yours obediently' and 'please tell me what to do sir and I will do it' are considered highly desirable traits). Because this is convenient to adults/elders and those in positions of power, the myth continues

2 comments:

Anjali Noronha
said...

Hi Subir ,Just to add - the graded classroom was also a product of the industrial revolution with assembly line production where atomising holistic work was seen as more efficient . An American education supervisor visiting Germany was impressed with this and took it back to the States with him. Your timing is about right. Multiagency group self paced learning situations are definitely qualitatively better than mono grade systems and instead of capitalising on the phenomena of small schools as they exist in India today and using them to our advantage - we think it's a disadvantage. The problem is not with the multiagegroup multi grade class situation but the technology of class wise textbooks and curriculum which constrain the teacher. Can we develop a movement for more flexible learning systems?

About Me

Former Educational Quality Advisor to MHRD, Government of India; developed the Quality Framework for the implementation of the Right To Education and Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan, India's EFA programme. Now, Principal Coordinator - Group Ignus, which comprises of IgnusERG (consulting company), Ignus-PAHAL (non-profit) and Ignus-OUTREACH (low cost educational publishing). Work on large-scale systemic change in education, advising state and national governments in Asia, developing appropriate models for vulnerable population groups, and improving the quality of governmental as well as NGO educational programmes. This involves improved curricula, textbooks, teacher training and capacity building at various levels. Also reaching out to teachers and grassroots functionaries making an effort to bring about improvement wherever they are, in whichever way they can.